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Myth: during a retrospective investigation, something is waiting to be “found”

I’ll cut to the chase: there is nothing waiting to be found, or “revealed.” These “causes” that we’re thinking we’re “finding”? We’re constructing them, not finding them. We’re constructing them because we are the ones that are choosing where (and when) to start asking questions, and where/when to stop asking the questions. We’ve “found” a root cause when we stop looking. And in many cases, we’ll get lazy and just chalk it up to “human error.”

As Erik Hollnagel has said (Hollnagel, 2009, p. 85):

“In accident investigation, as in most other human endeavours, we fall prey to the What-You-Look-For-Is-What-You-Find or WYLFIWYF principle. This is a simple recognition of the fact that assumptions about what we are going to see (What-You-Look-For), to a large extent will determine what we actually find (What-You-Find).”

More to the point: “What-You-Look-For-Is-What-You-Fix”

We think there is something like the cause of a mishap (sometimes we call it the root cause, or primary cause), and if we look in the rubble hard enough, we will find it there. The reality is that there is no such thing as the cause, or primary cause or root cause . Cause is something we construct, not find. And how we construct causes depends on the accident model that we believe in. (Dekker, 2006)

Nancy Leveson comments on this in her excellent book Engineering a Safer World this idea (p.20):

Subjectivity in Selecting Events

The selection of events to include in an event chain is dependent on the stopping rule used to determine how far back the sequence of explanatory events goes. Although the first event in the chain is often labeled the ‘initiating event’ or ‘root cause’ the selection of an initiating event is arbitrary and previous events could always be added.

Sometimes the initiating event is selected (the backward chaining stops) because it represents a type of event that is familiar and thus acceptable as an explanation for the accident or it is a deviation from a standard [166]. In other cases, the initiating event or root cause is chosen because it is the first event in the backward chain for which it is felt that something can be done for correction.

The backward chaining may also stop because the causal path disappears due to lack of information. Rasmussen suggests that a practical explanation for why actions by operators actively involved in the dynamic flow of events are so often identified as the cause of an accident is the difficulty in continuing the backtracking “through” a human [166].

A final reason why a “root cause” may be selected is that it is politically acceptable as the identified cause. Other events or explanations may be excluded or not examined in depth because they raise issues that are embarrassing to the organization or its contractors or are politically unacceptable.